


The Locket

by circusgymgirl



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Spells & Enchantments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:02:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24658033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/circusgymgirl/pseuds/circusgymgirl
Summary: trespassing teenagers. spells. traumatic family feels.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	The Locket

“I don’t know about this, Si,” I tell him. He just smiles. We’ve been here enough times that he knows I’m just saying this because I feel like I should, not because I actually don’t like the idea. I always like Silas’s ideas. 

He pulls the car up to the edge of the lawn, as there are no parking spaces or even a real road leading up to it. 

“We’re trespassing. It’s dangerous. Exciting.”

“Illegal,” I counter. 

He changes tactics. “It’s not like a million other teenagers haven’t done this before.”

“So what you’re saying is, we’re not unique,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt.

He groans. “Do you have to turn everything I say into something negative?”

“I don’t have to,” I tell him, “I just like to.” I reach over for the door handle, but before I reach it, Silas’s hands are around my waist, tickling me. I shriek, my hand falling from the door as I lean into him. 

“I love that about you,” he whispers, his mouth suddenly right next to my ear. “Annoys the hell out of me sometimes, but I love it.”

“‘Sometimes’,” I say, taking advantage of the break in tickling to get the door open. I’m out of the car before he can catch me again. “Coming?”

He gets out and walks around the car, coming to face me. He extends a hand. “Ready?” 

I take a breath, then grab his hand. “Ready.”

* * *

The house is both more creepy and less creepy up close. Far away, it looks large and foreboding, set back far enough from the road that you would have no idea what was happening in the house if you didn’t come closer. And there’s nothing around, either, so if you wanted to murder someone, this would be the spot. You’d have to be careful of rebellious teenagers who like to trespass on balmy summer nights, though. 

The moon is full tonight, which I’m sure was planned on Silas’s part because it provides both light and an extra level to the creepy.

“Spooky, right?” He whispers, closer to me than I realize and I jump. He laughs. “Got you.”

“Shut up.” He’s right, though. It is spooky. Spookier than it should have been, which got to me a little, something I’d never admit. But nonetheless, a chill crept up my spine. “Let’s get this over with,” I say, pushing open the door. It’s barely there to begin with, and there’s no doorknob either, but it feels good to open it, just like I would open the door to my house. Except my door doesn’t creak like that, or make me feel as though I’m going to pull away with half a dozen slivers of wood piercing my skin. 

I step inside carefully, making sure the jagged edges of the wood don’t catch on my jeans or sweater. The wood creaks loudly as I step on it, and I flinch even though I know there’s no one around to hear it. 

“Hello?” 

I freeze mid motion. I whirl to face Silas, knowing even before I see the shock on his face that it wasn’t him. It came from somewhere in the house, not from behind me, and despite it's familiarity, it didn't sound at all like him.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

Silas grips my shoulder. “Maybe we should just get out of here.”

“We made it this far,” I counter. “Besides, it’s probably just some other kids.” Even as I say this, though, there’s a fear working itself into the back of my brain. 

I take another step, and the wood creaks again. 

“Is anybody there?” The voice is different this time, and I nearly sag in relief.

“Yeah,” I call back, feeling Silas’s disapproval. “It’s just me and Si.”

“You’re going to get us killed, Haven,” Silas whispers.

“It’s just Grayson,” I say, my worry changing from  _ what’s out there? _ to  _ what is my brother doing here? _

“Haven?” This time, the voice is Echo’s. The first voice was, too, I realize in retrospect. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I call back, and Silas finally seems to relax. At least he follows me as I cross what I assume to be the living room. There’s a door off to the right side and a set of stairs leading to what seems to be the basement directly in front of me. I start toward the stairs, but Silas catches my arm, spinning me to face him. My hand scratches across the jagged wooden edges on the door frame as I spin.

“What do you think you’re doing, Have? Going into the basement of an abandoned house? This is how murders happen.”

I roll my eyes. “Stop being so dramatic. It’s just my brother and his friends.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do. We’re not living in a horror movie.” I pull my arm from his grasp and start down the stairs, moving faster than necessary so as not to chicken out. Even if I won't admit it, Silas is right. This isn't the smartest decision. 

The scene I find at the bottom of makes me halt in my tracks, and Silas almost runs into me.

Grayson, Echo, and Fawn are spread out in a triangle surrounding a pile of strange stuff, including a candle that is teetering on a crooked board, one wrong move away from falling over onto the floor of a building built entirely of wood. 

“Are you guys insane?” I ask, disregarding my pink sweater, a wine bottle, and the lock of hair, though each alarming in their own right, to focus on the real danger. “That thing catches anything, this whole place is going up in flames.”

“That’s the point,” Echo replies, grinning. Something’s off about her, though I can’t pinpoint what. Maybe it’s just this whole experience is making me see abnormalities that aren’t there.

“What? Your plan is to commit arson?”

“No,” Grayson says, as if this should be obvious. As if lighting candles in places prone to bursting into flames is something anybody would do. “Our plan was to cast a spell.”

“Grayson!” Echo cries, glaring at him. It’s a glare I’ve been on the other side of enough to learn not to get on Echo’s bad side. Somehow my younger brother's best friend is one of the most intimidating people I know. Grayson doesn’t even flinch, though, just meets her gaze calmly. There’s a whole dialogue there, the same way Silas and I can communicate without saying a word. I can’t remember a time when there was a Grayson but not an Echo, even though I know that there was. It wasn't a long time, though. 

I turn to the third and newest member of the trio. The one who’s also most likely to give me answers. “Fawn, what is going on?”

Fawn looks at the two of them, but they aren’t paying attention. “We were trying to cast a spell, like Grayson said.”

“Okay,” I say, stretching the word out as I try to get a handle on my anger. I close my eyes momentarily, and lean into Silas' hand on my arm, steading me. 

“Why?” 

Fawn shrugs in response to Silas’s question.  “I don’t know. It was their idea.” 

As she says it, I get the feeling she’s not just talking about this, but about everything the three of them do. 

I’m not entirely sure what I hope to get out of this why, either. It’s not like whatever spell they were planning to cast was going to be real or have any bearing on anybody’s real life. If it didn't seem so dangerous, I probably wouldn’t have even been concerned.

But then, they have  _ my _ sweater, for some unknown reason. I’m sure both Echo and Fawn have sweaters that could be used, if the criteria was a sweater. If not, I don’t know why mine fit the profile when none of theirs would. 

And then there is the empty wine bottle, which pointed to a lack of level-headed decision making. 

I take a step into the triangle they formed, a formation they’d retained, which struck me as slightly odd, or at least intentional. I stalked quickly to the middle of the circle and picked up the candle. I blew it out carefully, unsure of the response I was going to get in response to this particular decision. 

I spin around to face Echo, who has turned her glare on me. It takes everything I have not to shrink under her gaze, to do something stupid because she can make you feel like you don’t have a choice. It’s happened too many times before. 

“I don’t know how you three got here, or why, and I don’t want to know.” Which was a blatant lie, as I was burning with curiosity, but it wouldn’t be hard to pull the truth out of Grayson later. “But we are all leaving. Now, before we actually do burn this place down.”

“But we have to cast the spell.” 

Silas and I exchange a glance. “What’s the spell for, Echo?” I ask.

She looks down, as if struggling with something. “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“Grayson?” Silas asks. 

“He doesn’t know,” Echo cuts in, before Grayson can say anything. “Neither does Fawn.”

I don’t know what to say to that, how to get her to talk about what’s so important about doing this spell. So I go for something easier, which is the wine bottle. I pick it up and look in it. Just the slightest residue in the bottom, nothing left. 

“The three of you drank a whole bottle of wine?”

“We didn’t,” Fawn says quietly, clearly trying to take the focus off of Echo. “We gave it to Theo James in exchange for a ride here and back. Echo wanted the empty bottle, and he didn’t, so we gave it to him in a water bottle.”

I want to ask her how she came across wine, when Theo couldn’t. Or why they asked Theo James, of all people, for a ride. But before I can figure out the best way to phrase this, Echo says something. It’s too quiet for me to hear the first time, but she repeats herself. 

“Ten years.” 

The words hang heavy in the silence. I see Silas register them, his face softening. I see Grayson freeze, willing himself not to look at Echo, not to let her see the pain he feels due to her being in pain, because he knows it would just hurt her more. 

It takes Fawn the longest to put it together. She only knows this Echo, the one who’s had years of time to construct the mask she wears almost all of the time. She only knows the after Echo, the one who acts as if it doesn’t affect her, ever. Who desperately wants it to never affect her, despite the fact that it always will. I doubt Fawn’s even heard about it from Echo directly. Everybody knows what happened, and she may have gleaned bits and pieces from Grayson, but she wouldn’t know the details. 

My eyes fall on Echo last. She’s looking down, her hand at her neck. The one thing she always wears, that’s always there despite the rapid transitions of her wardrobe, is the necklace. But, as I focus on the details, I notice what initially felt off to me about Echo. 

The necklace isn’t there.

“What happened to your necklace?” The question slips out before I can force the words down, because I know that they are probably the worst ones to ask right now. 

Even before I hear the answer, though, everything clicks into place. The sweater, the way I took it from mom’s closet six months ago. Her expression when I came in at 3 am, one that I attributed solely to the fact that I was coming home at 3 am on a school night. But maybe it was something more.

The fact that, before Grayson was born, Echo’s mom used to babysit me and Silas. That she used to show us the spell books, make us sit in that triangle and recite nonsense. It became a game I used to play as a kid, like tag or house. I forgot how seriously she took it. How, if it happened now I would’ve thought she was a little weird, a little off, but I would’ve realized that she was in full belief of the stuff she was always trying to get us to do. 

I remember this one, because it was the last one we’d ever done. Me and Silas had come to pick up Grayson from a playdate with Echo, and we’d gotten roped into participating. I was eight, old enough to know it was a scam, but I went along with it. 

I don’t remember what she lost, it wasn’t important at the time, but I remember that we needed something that was tied to the missing item in some way, something to anchor it here, or some nonsense like that. 

The sweater, a tie to her mom, just like that necklace was. Maybe the wine was that way too. Because that’s where the pills were. Far too many of them, but she knew that, crushed up into a bottle of wine. That she drank too fast, after drinking at least one other bottle. The necklace with the note in it, words written so small they needed a microscope to read them. 

“I don’t know.” Echo’s voice draws me back to the present, but reminds me so much of the way she was those first few months after. The way her control was slipping. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t one hundred percent in control of the narrative either. She's like that now, holding onto control as hard as she can, giving everything she has to stay on top of it, but it is slipping away faster than she can pull it back. Finally, she sinks to the ground, pulling her knees in, turning into herself because it is easier than facing us.

“But you want to try to bring it back,” I say. I don’t need to see her nod or hear her muffled yes to know I’m right. 

I make eye contact with Silas. There’s a part of me that very badly wants to turn away, from the spell and the memories, to go back to the car and take us all home, to ignore the awful parts about all of this, the ones that can suffocate me if I think about them too long. 

But then I look at Echo’s tiny form on the floor and I know that whether or not this works, doing it is helping. It’s helping her stay connected to her mom, and she’s trying. She’s not giving up. 

Silas is the one who goes over to her, in the end. Rests a gentle hand on her shoulder. Except for Fawn, he’s the least connected. For Echo, she was her mom, her everything. For me, she was my mom’s best friend, she was a dead body I was too young to be the first one to see. For Grayson, she was a godmother. And he was with Echo when she found out. He’s been there the whole time, as tangled up in it as I am. Silas lived through it, Silas gets it, but he’s a little more removed. He never saw her body.

* * *

Echo slowly uncurls herself when Silas tell her we’ll help her do her spell. Echo arranges the sweater, the bottle, and the lock of hair in a triangle around the candle. I want to ask her where she got the lock of hair, but the silence had become too charged for me to feel comfortable breaking it. 

We arrange ourselves in a regular pentagon around the center, Echo moving us an inch or two to left, then back to the right for a shockingly long time. Finally, she seems satisfied with where we are, and instructs us to sit down. 

Everything is silent for a long moment, the loudest silence I’ve ever heard. Then, without warning, Echo bursts into speech. It sounds thunderously loud after the silence, and it’s all I can do not to flinch.

I don’t understand a word of the spell. It’s not in English—they never were. But it’s gorgeous. Rhythmic and soothing, in the right circumstances. These are not the right circumstances. We’re in an old abandoned house, far from anybody else, except perhaps an intoxicated Theo—which, come to think of it, was a very bad plan for getting home. Plus, the house is essentially falling apart around us. In this setting, it’s haunting. I feel a chill creeping up my spine, a pit of dread filling my stomach, though I don’t know why. It’s not like the spell is actually going to work. Besides, even if it did, all we’re doing is retrieving a necklace. There’s nothing criminal about that. 

Echo continues, the volume of her voice growing then falling, the swell of it unsettling me. I close my eyes, and I’m back in her living room, listening to her mother reciting the exact same spell, resisting the urge to roll my eyes or burst out into hysterical laughter. There’s nothing funny about it this time. 

I have to keep reminding myself that, despite the haunting quality of the spell, it’s nothing more than a bunch of words strung together, said by someone who sounds a lot like someone else. And it’s not a coincidence they sound the same, it’s genetics. 

And, as suddenly as it started, it’s over. The silence is deafening this time. Silas catches my eye, asking me what to do. I shrug, then tilt my head toward Echo.  _ Let her lead _ . 

Echo looks longing into the middle of the circle as if she’s expecting the necklace to pop up. It doesn’t. I wonder how long it will take her to let go of the hope that the necklace will appear and if the necklace ever does materialize, whether she will always believe it was from the spell, her mother watching over her.

We’re subdued as we gather the things. We ditch the candle and the hair, but I take the wine bottle and the sweater. I still wonder who’s hair it is. I know it’s not her moms. It might be hers, from when she was little.

There was a box they found. It was hers. Had some keepsakes in it, baby photos, the like. There may have been a lock of hair; I wouldn’t be surprised.

We head to the car. Silas beeps it open, reminding us we live in a time with cell phones and cars and not in the medieval-sounding world of the spell Echo just recited. I climb in the passenger seat, buckling my seat belt without thinking. 

The buckle won’t go in. I hold it, so it can’t move, but the buckle still won’t go in. It’s too dark to see, so I run my finger along the edge of the piece attached to the seat and my finger catches something. I pull it out and hold it up to the front window, the moon illuminating it. 

I gasp. 

Because in my hand is a necklace, an open locket, and inside is a note with words so tiny you’d need a microscope to read them. 


End file.
